Swiss Finishing School (or SFS) is actually a quilter’s retreat held each year at a hotel in the village of New Glarus, WI, a town founded by Swiss immigrants. Each year about a dozen quilters gather to work on their UFO’s (unfinished objects) and give each other encouragement to finish those projects. This retreat is traditionally held in the winter and is a nice getaway as the hotel has an indoor pool and hot tub where we meet in the evening to discuss our projects (or maybe have a glass of wine!).

At this year’s retreat we had some gorgeous quilts get finished or almost finished. Some of us also started on new projects. My project was a retirement quilt that I and a co-worker were making for another co-worker who just retired. Although it wasn’t finished at the retreat it did get finished just in time for this past week’s retirement party.

The memory quilt had star blocks done in colors that we knew our co-worker liked and blocks with photos of people in our department.
In the center of most of the stars were plain squares that we had everyone in our department sign.

Every year a group of us makes a quilt to raffle off to benefit LABMED which is a non-profit that I co-founded 10 years ago to assist Labradors (or Lab mixes) in rescue situations who have beyond the ordinary vet bills.

This year’s quilt is “12 Months of Labradors” and is probably one of the best, if not the best, that we have done. Please consider purchasing a raffle ticket for this quilt. The drawing is next Friday at the Labrador Retriever National Specialty and you don’t have to be there to win it.

You can view more photos of the quilt HERE.
The February block is the one that I contributed to this project.

I have discovered “Scrapbook Max” (http://www.scrapbookmax.com). Wish I had more hours in the day or needed less sleep as making a digital scrapbook page is a lot of fun. I designed this page tonight even though I should have been working on my blogging class homework. Sorry, Bean, I’ll get to it later!